Victor slipped away hastily, not only from hunger and thirst after what he held in his hand, but because a new flood of thought broke through his old trains of ideas. "Bastian!" said Bastian to himself on the way, "I have often held thee to be stupid, but so stupid as that--no, never. It is sinful that a man, a court-medicus, a thinker, should ruminate for months, often half-evenings together, and yet not bring the matter out, till he hears it, now for the first time. Verily, even the 'S' on the window fits!" The reader and I will take out of his hands the thing with which he is stoning himself before our faces; for he throws at both of us as well, because we failed to guess at anything just as much as he did. In short, the unknown happy one who makes the fair Clotilda unhappy, and for whom she sighs out her dumb, shy soul, and who for most of her charms has no eye at all, is the blind--Julius in Maienthal. Hence her desire to go thither. I should like to fill a folio volume with the proofs of this: Victor counted them off on his five fingers. On his thumb he said, "For Julius's sake she seeks little Julia; so, too, is it with Giulia." At the forefinger he said, "The French initial _I_ looks like an _S_ without the cross-stroke." At the middle finger, "Minerva has furnished him, indeed, not merely the flute, but also Minerva's fair face, and in this blind Cupid's-face Clotilda could lose herself without blushing; even from love for his friend Emanuel, she might have loved him." At the ring-finger, "Hence her justification of mis-matches, since his citizenly ring-finger is to be joined to her noble one." At the little finger, "By Heaven! all this proves not the least." For now, for the first time, all the proofs came upon him in a flood: in the first volume of this book there came often an unknown angel to Julius and said: "Be good, I will hover round thee, I will guard thy veiled soul,--I go back into heaven."-- Secondly, this angel once gave Julius a paper, and said, "Conceal it, and after a year, when the birches grow green in the temple, let Clotilda read it to thee; I take my flight, and thou wilt not hear me sooner than a year hence."---- All this fitted Clotilda as if it were moulded on her: she could never unfold to the blind one her dying heart,--she was going just now to Maienthal (how long is it still to Whitsuntide?) to read to him herself the leaf which she had handed to him in the character and mask of an angel,--finally, she was going off precisely then to St. Luna;----in short, everything hits to a hair.